From
Programming Pearls, Second Edition by Jon Bentley.
ISBN 0-201-65788-0.
In the early 1980's Lockheed engineers transmitted daily
a dozen drawings from a Computer Aided Design (CAD)
system in their Sunnyvale, California,
plant to a test station in Santa Cruz.
Although the facilities were just 25 miles apart,
an automobile courier service took over an hour
(due to traffic jams and mountain roads) and cost a hundred dollars per day.
Propose alternative data transmission schemes and
estimate their cost.
The computers at the two facilities were linked by microwave,
but printing the drawings at the test base would have
required a printer that was very expensive at the time.
The team therefore drew the pictures at the main plant,
photographed them,
and sent 35mm film to the test station by carrier pigeon,
where it was enlarged and printed photographically.
The pigeon's 45-minute flight took half the time of the car,
and cost only a few dollars per day.
During the 16 months of the project the pigeons transmitted
several hundred rolls of film,
and only two were lost
(hawks inhabit the area;
no classified data was carried).
Because of the low price of modern printers,
a current solution to the problem would probably use
the microwave link.
Your radical ideas about radical ideas have already occured to others.